HOVRW | New Horizon Aircraft Ltd. | earnings call 2026-09-15
Verbatim transcript (source: faster-whisper-small.en)

So next we have Brandon Robinson. Brandon is from New Horizon Aircraft. I just recently put research out in the company. It's on the website. You know, this story came to shoot me from a friend of mine in the IR space. It's, this industry is sort of burgeoning. I'm not even sure the industry really exists yet, parts of it. But I think that Brandon has done a great job of positioning this kind of in the emergence of this new industry and maybe a way to take advantage of sort of existing legacy markets. And I also think that if you look around at some of the public comms, Jobe and Eve and some of the urban air stories that are out there, they attract a lot of the investor interest, some very big companies, they have attracted a lot of money. And as I sometimes do, you know, I come up, I come to this story from the perspective of, you know, there's this industry that's looking ahead and he represents a player that's in the middle of that industry where I think there's a, you know, if you believe that the valuations of the public cops, he's a long ways from that. So I sort of feel like there's this thing about just, you know, him being able to capitalize on that valuation disconnect. But this is a great story. I really like it. It's really exciting, I think. And so I think everybody will like it. But we put out there, we're joining, you can go to the site and get it. If you don't know how to do that, let me know. You know quite a lot of new people here, but I can tell you that. Okay, thanks David. I'm a walker and talker, so if I had that mic you'd end up getting chucked at what you guys do. Okay, so just after lunch, I realized it's bring that kind of, you know, close lunch, sugar low. So if you don't know or can't remember anything else from this presentation, that is what we're building on the top right. We're building the full scale part of the site in our facility right now. So what is it? That is an aircraft that can take off and land vertically. So it does not need any sort of runway infrastructure, just a flat sort of surface or any sort of concrete structure or any helipad. Just like a helicopter. But on route, it transforms into just a normal aircraft. So much more efficient, much faster, much cheaper to operate and much safer than a helicopter. So essentially, a helicopter that is cheaper than it operates, much safer, much faster. And by the way, quieter as well. So let me test on this a little bit later. So lawyers actually want me to have five of these slides, if you believe it. Yeah, so what's a Horizon aircraft? This is a group of practical aviators and engineers that have a lifetime of experience building aircraft in electrification. They're busy right now building, like I said, a full scale aircraft. A while ago, I was an Air Force pilot, nearing the end of my career. Not because they were forcing me up, by the way, because it was a bunch of waste. And a group of investors approached my father, who owned an aerospace business, and they were really excited about this all-electric vertical takeoff and landing sort of air taxi space. This EV-tall space, sort of like the Jetsons, right? From one place to the other. And they were really excited about that. They saw us as a bunch of practical folks. Now, I have two decades flying Jetsons in the Air Force. That is like 60 years behind airplanes. You probably hit the upside the head if I said that way. Yeah, so practically speaking, they wanted a real look at the market space in this emerging advanced availability market to see if this was a realistic thing that could be done, whether it made sense or not. Overwhelmingly, we found that it did make sense, but there was a huge market gap growing. All of these all-electric machines would have about 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of lithium-ion batteries on board. And we didn't think that was a great idea for a flying machine. And they were all going to be limited to very short ranges. So we put together a really interesting concept. We never got those more practical. Hybrid electric power, so it has a gas engine on board. It could recharge itself while airborne and after it landed. Much faster. Could carry almost as much. And just cheaper at the tone and operating than helicopter. We'll get into some of that in a bit, but yeah, the person is playing. It's been a fantastic journey so far. So why do you even should be careful with what I say? You probably looked on the website, maybe not. I was a fighter pilot in the Air Force for 20 years, lucky enough to do the Canadian version of Top Gun. Got a mechanical engineering degree along the way. Did some license-making interests in business along the way, directed some major projects in the Air Force as well. Was in procurement for three years, trying to buy stuff and integrate it. New weapons systems onto the jets, and greater systems. And I'll tell you, three years in procurement is enough to make you want to think about a second career. Basically, the license would be dangerous. I get to ask all the engineers all the really embarrassing questions. They can laugh at me, and every once in a while I have a good idea. I also do have an airline transport pilot license, so I know it's like to fly commercially. I've written a couple of patents that underlie the core technology of aircraft. So I can sort of tap into it if anyone has technical questions. We're building a great team. I'll go into all the different folks on the screen. You can read yourself. Jason's here, to be honest. Correct me if I say something stupid. But I will say, over the last couple of months, let's say the last six to 12 months, we have got world-class folks on board. New CTO that has a major OEM is based, and it has been to the future that it was producing a full-scale all-electric aircraft and a few other that had a propulsion from one of the major OEMs as well. So this is a world-class team that's building a legitimate machine right now. And there it is. We'll get into the technology a bit more. We're going to take off with that in mode. Right now you can see the distributed electric fans in the wings and the small wings at the front with the merits. They power it to lift off the ground. When it wants to go forward, it's a push-up rock at the back. Those technical folks that is connected directly to the gas turbine engine pushes the aircraft forward, and we'll save the party tricks in a minute for our patented wing technology. So impressive performance. Okay, so there it is again in its vertical takeoff and landing mode. 460 kilometers an hour, right? So the average speed for some of the competitors in this space in the 200-kilometer-an-hour range. Not even that. 800 kilometers, right? So we're burning a fuel source. No kidding, that has 30 to 40 times the energy density of it, even the best batteries, right? So it's, again, it's machine laser design for the end user and not for some fancy marketing. So about 10 times, I'd say five to six times the range of our competitors, which is nice, carrying 700 kilos and seven people. So six people in the back, one pilot in front, and that's enough space in the cabin to enable some really cool missions as well. It can take off and land vertically, just like a normal helicopter, like I said. It can also do a short takeoff and landing. So maybe you only have 300 or 400 feet of runway. It can still take off and land at a very short distance. And it can also take off and land just like a normal aircraft. Okay, so there it is sitting on the ground, the electric motors in the wings and the canary inspire up. The aircraft left straight off the ground. Push your prop engages, the aircraft starts rolling forward. At a safe speed, the wings and the canary are closed. This is our patented technology, and this is the key to the fast and efficient sort of forward flight. For 90% of the mission, this aircraft is flying just like a normal aircraft. Again, unlike most of the competitors, they have a multi-copter situation that's very inefficient, or a helicopter, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup. Really efficient going from point A to point B. Again, that's our patented technology, and that is working right now on a large-scale prototype. So we have a large-scale prototype currently flying. So if you can build faster, cheaper, and safer helicopter, there's going to be a lot of pretty interesting things you can do with that. That's a Morgan Stanley sort of report. Transform logistics, like a $1 trillion market by 2040. Transform logistics, $500 billion in fuel. Shared mobility, another $500 billion roughly. Military defense up there says $10 billion, but I'll tell you, we are the recipients of prestigious USDOD grants for research and development. Helped us develop our large-scale prototype. They put us on the radar for a lot of the OEMs. And we are talking to two defense prime contractors. One of them said, basically, we designed the same airplane, but you used DS2 to pass. So can't say who it is or how, but we're involved on that. I'll tell you, when I was in the Air Force, I was planning the leading coalition strike missions. You know, 100 ship missions where we'd have Overwatch and they'd be going to the helicopters, pick up wounded pilots or wounded folks. I would have loved to have one of these things in the mix, but it'd be great. Much faster than the B-22, if anyone knows the space. And about $1.15 the cost to procure, and about $1.80 the cost to operate. The B-22 is about $80,000 an hour. Thanks to the C-17, pretty proud of this. So low to the C-17, we're up to where I need to go, rapid deployment, and again, the Air Forces, the Navy and Marine Forces around the world are really excited about that. So get these things where they need to go. We're big on runway independence right now, so literally the definition of don't need a runway, that's what happens to anything. Really exciting in the emergency medical space, right? A lot of folks spending a lot of money on these $15 million helicopters that cost probably $15,000 to $20,000 an hour to operate. Our cabin's big enough to do medical evacuation. So imagine getting people in the hospital in half the time from that, you know, injury site on the side of the road, or literally from twice the distance during that golden hour. Pretty powerful stuff. And 75% cheaper per unit mile that you travel to operate. So in the helicopter with all these massive inspection cycles, literally trying to fling itself apart in any given time, multiple layers of redundancy, less maintenance, much, much quicker on rig. So if you think about it, about 30% cheaper per hour to use, but in that hour it goes twice as far, and those things stack up. We think there's a lot of room for business travel as well. So, you know, your airline, you know, whatever airport, some of the passengers that paid a little bit extra, they hop into the turn mag, they load into one of these, and they go directly to where they need to go. You know, maybe it's a cottage three hours to the north. They get there in a fraction of the time, and finally a new vern, and a rent-seeded car, and all that good stuff. Now, that's a really exciting way to travel. I want one of these to travel with. I'm hoping to get the first one off the line, but it's a... Batman called it, and he wants it. So, as a hybrid electric aircraft, it does not need any charging infrastructure. I'll say that again. It needs no vern of course. It needs no high-power charging cables. When you land, you don't have to find the world's longest extension kit, or to plug it back in for eight hours. It can recharge itself, which is awesome. So think, really, Godwether, and like a hurricane rolls through, you can set up the entire power grid. Instead of hiring an $80,000 elk, it's whatever, $25,000 an hour helicopter, to roll in slowly and try to fix stuff. Rock and deploy these without any power grid whatsoever. With a hybrid onboard, it has a generator that can operate as a mobile command center. You name it. Pretty cool. So I mentioned much cheaper to own an operator. I'm not going to go through this slide in super detail. So for a 500-hour use per year, you can see the math works out pretty well. So we're at half the cost of a helicopter right there per hour, or sorry, per unit length. We will find our model, and it's actually a little bit better than that, which is nice. So faster, almost the same payload as a helicopter, like I said, much, much cheaper. Notice, we all like our folks. And we're, we pride ourselves on, you know, doing some realistic math. That's using realistic numbers for lithium-ion batteries, 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of them, and getting change over so often at current market prices. That'll come down, which will be exciting, but again, it's hard to beat the metrics. It's another thing that I'm really excited about. This is an airplane that is built for bad weather. Hey, what's the number one reason most helicopters crash? Anyway, they're usually trying to avoid clouds, right? So helicopter operations, 99% of them operate in good weather only. It's a tough operation. You know, a bunch of high-net-worth individuals show up for their sightseeing tour, and they want to go from point A to point B. And, you know, a pilot looks out and sees the clouds that are low and says, yeah, we can't go. They don't understand fire, and they get really mad, they never fly with them again. And so there's this diametrically opposed thing where the operators really want to fly these folks. The passengers are putting a lot of pressure on these folks to fly, and the helicopters cannot fly in bad weather. There's only a few in the world that can actually fly in clouds with known icing. And to fly under instrument rules, so in clouds like normal commercial aircraft, it's a very rare thing to carry passengers. This aircraft will be remaining for certification for flight into known icing. And as a normal aircraft flying 98% of the mission just on normal sort of wind-borne flight, it will be able to fly in clouds under IFR rules, just like any commercial aircraft. Really safe and operationally effective. You don't have to tell your passengers if you can't go, right? As long as the weather at the destination is sufficient to land, yeah, it can fly just under normal, like, say, instrument flying rules, like any commercial aircraft that flies now. It makes it very safe. And that's exciting. You talk to operators, that blows them away, that one thing. So the metrics, the speed, the layers of safety are great. The fact that they can use them all year round, and they know how to disappoint customers, that's pretty significant. So where are we now? Lots of words on this slide. Essentially, we have a half-scale prototype that's up and flying. That aircraft on the bottom right is a real one. That's not a rendering. That is a 22-foot windstand. So from here to the wall, about 50 feet long, weighs about 600 pounds. If you do your research, and I'm sure you will, in this space, there are very few companies that are flying a large-scale prototype. In two years, we will have a full-scale prototype ready to fly. Any comps on the market, you can look this up. We're at least a 20x to that metric, even the lowest, to a public company that's flying a large-scale prototype. And only hands will I find any sort of size like this. That's large enough to prove the technology at a large scale. And we are currently building the full-scale aircraft right now, which is very exciting. Love that slide. It's like chained to the ground. That's our half-scale prototype in hover testing. And you can check out a lot of the flight tests actually on YouTube. If you go to YouTube, Verizon Aircraft, you can see a lot of really cool stuff that Jason's done on the team to get the real personal feel, but also see some of those large-scale prototype flight tests. Another cool shot of an Indian wind tunnel. That's a climatic wind tunnel, by the way, and we'll use that to test all the cold weather stuff on the full-scale aircraft to make sure it's bad with hardened and ready for the real world. We're talking to a lot of folks that are, of course, very interested. We have a huge amount of outreach now that we've kind of demonstrated our forward progress. We laid out the milestones and we're hitting them, and that's exciting for a lot of folks. We're talking to the regional operators, of course. If you have a helicopter fleet and you're primarily going just for point A to point B, that is about half of the global helicopters, by the way. You're pretty excited about something that is safer, cheaper, quieter, and most of all, 75% cheaper for you and mine to operate. We're talking to some large operators as well, again on the business travel model, and we see United in this space make a $2 billion order into Archer and a few other large OEMs like that. The evil finance. We just got back from Ireland, and there's a lot less or less interested in potentially acquiring large fleets of these to their lease house. And Brian Merker, CFO, who used to work in a public company that was dedicated to helicopter operations, built an incredible financial model for us. Very detailed and we under MDA, we've shared that with a number of lessors. They're very excited about the economy, basically all the numbers that stack up correctly. Now, finally, parts manufacturers, of course, we're going to be supporting this fleet when we get going globally. That's a significant source of revenue for a lot of large OEMs, and we're going to follow the same model. Okay, everyone asked me about certification, so instead of answering questions later, I'll talk about it right now. It's a long process to certifying a new aircraft. Let's rewind it in 2021. There was a question, then, that these types of aircraft could even be certified in the first place. Fast forward, there's story, I should have said rewind. Fast forward to 2025. All of the rules have been established for the certification of these new aircraft, and these, the beginning few, so Jobe's S4, parts are midnight, they will be certified within the next, most likely 12 to 18 months. So now, we spent all that money establishing the rules, we can play by that rule book, which is nice. There's visibility, it's much lower risk for investors getting into the space, and quite frankly, there's much more sophisticated conversations about how these aircraft are going to be certified. We're based in Canada, which allows us a number of advantages. One, there's a lot of time to do the financing, but it's a great way. Two, we work with Transport Canada, which is a smaller, more agile organization than the FAA, which is currently inundated with 600 different companies trying to certify these types of aircraft. So we get a little more personalized attention, not to loosen the dollar, it's pretty attractive for investors out there. And the Canadian regulatory agency has specialty in power lift, so there's a lot of bench strength there. We also have on our board of directors, a gentleman by the name of John Maris, basically a Canadian aerospace hall of famer, founded a company called Certification Centre Canada, where he cherry picked all of the best certification people from North America, formed a company, and they were working with them to put together a really lean, really realistic plan that will start hitting milestones for very soon. Okay, so that's it. Unlike a lot of the companies that you've researched in this space, that took it, if you build it, they will come approach, and they're all electric and have thousands of pounds of batteries on board. We were laser-focused on designing a machine that could be built with real technology, with a world-class team that's very practical. Yeah, I'm just going to do some amazing things. So I'm sure there's lots of questions. I'll finish up there. Yes? In your medical version, do you have a partner for kitting up a medical suite, like air-methods, sort of thing? Yeah, so there's a few options. We haven't selected our final partner, but we've visited a few of those folks, and they do it right. So you take the airplane there, you give them all the CAD drawings, and they do it for you so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Absolutely. So we've talked with them, and we've actually made some provisions. A good example is the door and the ingress and how we're actually going to get the stretcher in and out. And so we've adjusted the cabin dimensions and some of the stuff in there. Yes, sir? I don't know what they use. So carbon fiber on a lot of it. There could be some aluminum actually on the wings, which would help on the prototype keep costs down from a manufacturing perspective, but that's not settled yet. It's mainly carbon fiber with some titanium. There's some Kevlar in some of the wraps for each of those engines. Each of those engines, by the way, is a separate unit, right? So one can't destroy the next one and can't destroy the next one. So each is a separate. I should have put some of that earlier. It's mechanically, thermally, electrically isolated. So no casketing failures. We can fly with like 30% of them disabled. Unlike helicopter that only has one, right? So it's not good when you lose that thing. Yep. That's a great question. That took a lot of time to be quite frank. So it was a balance of creating a larger version, which we actually have shown in the military. So we have a larger twin engine concept that we have not unveiled yet. But that, I mean, that was just early days when we were putting the concept together. This one, the seven passengers, so six passengers, six passenger, one pilot size was perfect for Medevac. The economics were kicking butt on the helicopter scale. And it was, you know, if you go up and buy an order of two from weight, you go up and buy an order of 10 on manufacturing costs. The prototype was pretty expensive. So this was a really nice in-between thing that would compete against a lot of helicopters and just blow them out of the water. Did you know why they're being actually with titanium? I did. I don't know what happened especially after this. Small amounts. These dwarves, too. We have some questions over here. Yeah, I have a question. Are you targeting Medevac? Yeah, so what we're not doing is, like some of the other companies that are promising to be an operator at the same time as No Man, there's a reason why Airbus operated its own airline. When I left the Air Force, I flew for a little bit in a company called Top Aces, and the operators are under what's called an air operator certificate. And with military jets that were certified for civilian use, right, so they went through the certification program, it is so tremendously complicated just to operate those aircraft. It's a whole company in and of itself, right? It's like a thousand people. And so I don't, you know, good luck to those folks that are going to build them and then also operate through an elevator taxi, but that is far more complicated than they would like to admit. We are just laser focused on being the great OEM and building an awesome machine that's going to be widely proliferated and supporting that machine globally. Yes, sir? Well, you, I don't want you to say something else. Can you talk about maybe the next question? I usually do. Sorry? What the next question, it seems to me you've got something coming up here in the next nine days. Yes, and so this has been publicly released. We are actively in our flight test program for the large-scale prototype, that I showed a little bit earlier. When it completes, what's called transition. So that means it's taken off, it's hovered, it's accelerated forward, it's closed its wings, and it's achieved full transition to normal wing-borne flight. That is a huge milestone. There's only a couple companies in the world that have actually accomplished that at any large-scale prototype. We will be accomplishing that soon. Yeah, that's what we said, we're on track of the program. We ran into a cold weather, but we've learned enough from it that we're actually building a full-scale aircraft, like I said, that that is the next major obstacle. We will transition that to large-scale prototype, and that's going to be huge. So, are there, can you kind of, what are the technical hurdles to get from there? So, we're already starting to, great question, by the way, we're already starting to de-risk that program. If you walked into the hangar right now, you'd see a 32-inch disc fan that is the main propulsion unit on the full-scale aircraft. We're about to spin up and measure thrust, measure thermals, measure the electrical signals and everything, and we're going to bust it and build it, and again, make it better. You'll see the actuators moving forward and back, so we're de-risking the full-scale technology. So the half-scale aircraft, the most important information we've learned from that has de-risk a certain amount we know is going to work. Now it's kind of, now it's tweaking and building the full-scale propulsion units, and the main core technologies and proving those out will be very vocal along the way as we tell that story of success, and at no giving in 24 months, you'll see a full-scale aircraft sitting in the hangar, which I cannot wait for. It's going to be great. So you don't have to apply only laws of physics to get there? No, no, it's, again, we are very proud of this. We don't need batteries to double their density. Dr. Fan technology has been around for the last 70 years. It's been proven. It works. We know all about it. We're not counting on electric motors doing some fancy breakthrough either. In fact, we discount all of the specifications that the manufacturers give us because they all lie in the cheat, same with the battery manufacturers. But yes, lots of success stories, successful milestones along the way. What's the ceiling? Pardon me? What's the ceiling of the plane? Well, the true ceiling is weighing about 10,000 feet, but we're limiting it to 10,000 feet as an unpressurized aircraft initially. It doesn't really need to go much higher than that to be worth it. How much does that cost to build? We do. So this is a long conversation about how aircraft are actually sold. There's usually a price up here plus higher specific optional functions that you can purchase. Call that maybe 10 million, and then we offer discounts. And if we sell them in the $6 million range, that would be highly profitable of course. So if that makes fuzzy sense. Just with the manufacturing timeline, what's you add there? Yes, it's going to be much simpler to produce than a helicopter. Again, helicopters is this symphony of impossibly complicated parts, each of which, you know, the name shop in Robinson R44 takes 14 months to manufacture, for example, because of the tolerances and the testing inspection. So much simpler to manufacture. My father was in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing for a long time. So everything we do, we have looked through to manufacture. So that's why the Wayne John Taper fancy, every single fan you get in is the same. There's a lot of design for manufacturing that's coming to it. One more. Yes, sir. What do you need to master? More capital. We've been very efficient so far. You can take a look. I mean, we've burned through maybe 20% of the capital that all the other companies have to get to where we are. And so we recently erased. We're going to do the next 12 to 18 months. We're going to be erasing strategically once the share price rebounds a little bit. And we can get our story to wonderful folks, slightly new folks. Great. Our next round is targeting, we're targeting in the maybe 10 to 15 million range. Again, very modest amounts to continue making that progress. One more. In case of an emergency, do you see this making emergency descent? Oh, man, yeah. We're really glad you guys said this is where it's awesome, right? Emergency helicopter is a real-life emergency. A real emergency in this aircraft. So say that a whole main power unit fails. There's no more push or thrust. The batteries will be charged after a takeout. And so you look and you find the squad, it's gliding like a normal airplane, 12 to 1 ratio or whatever. So it's really, really efficient. You find a spot, you can open up the wings, transition to vertical landing, and land at any spot. You don't have to crash land in the field or find a runway that's available. At the end, you can accomplish that landing with a fraction of the motors. So much, much, much. Even over and above an airplane, I've had engine failures in an airplane. A left engine exploded in the air force, right? Almost took out the whole airplane. So this thing, it's even safer than a normal aircraft. It's going to have to be very similar to that one. Yep, that's exactly right. Okay, so what's the numbers there? What sort of year do you sell those numbers for you? What's the model for this thing? Oh, so we can easily wind up in itself 250 to 300 per year with the 1000 That's using current demand modeling. Cirrus SR22, like a normal private aircraft, they sell 250 to 300 of them per year. We can easily manage that. And that's where we're tooling up for about that 250 to 300 units per year. So you'll be around, right? I will be around. Yeah, I'm going to be super excited to watch it. You're not going to tell me about that part. But part of the line. There's no bad parts. Yeah, you're on the Ohio State Band. That's awesome. A little sense in that. Sorry, I'm an Irish fan. I'm still listening. Thanks, folks.